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A very special Christmas rod for my nephew

This is a rod I have been working on for the past couple weeks between customer rods. It's a Christmas gift for my 17 yr old nephew Cody.

You guys know me I like to think outside the box, well this one has a few very outside the box things on it which I think came out even better than I could have hoped for. Read onto see what I am talking about.

My nephew loves anything Patriotic, military, history, or aviation, so I did this rod with a Patriotic theme to it for him. The blank is a 9ft 8wt 2pc fly rod blank which is dark blue in color. The reel seat is one of the 'different" things I came up with. it started out as a plain ol' all graphite FUJI spin seat (nothing special) but I decided to customize it by wrapping not only the front and rear hoods which you guys have seen me do before on fly rods. But I also wrapped the entire barrel of the reel seat with HT Red Metallic thread and finished over it with Threadmaster.

The grips are all natural cork, then this is where I came up with something really different far as the parts used. I did a split grip with an aluminum spacer, which is not out of the norm since you can buy aluminum spacers, but I didn't but an aluminum spacer....the red aluminum spacer in the grip of this rod is actually an all aluminum flashlight from the dollar store which I did a lot of thread wrapping and finish over.

This is what it started out as ...

In front of the reel seat you can see a machined red aluminum piece, that is actually the screw on battery cap for the flashlight which I wrapped over on the threads and finsihed over with threadmaster which makes a nice looking machined trim piece.

I also did my first marbling on this rod. I used red, blue, yellow over a base of white paint. I'm very pleased with the way it came out as it has the exact look I was going for. Then over the marbling I did a quote from one of my nephews Heros Chuck Yeager which reads "You don't concentrate on the risks. You concentrate on the results".

For the thread wraps it uses metallic blue, metallic red, and metallic silver. Then I added a "History Channel (his fav TV ch) coin to the butt for him.